Washington leads the nation in construction job losses — here’s why
While Oregon’s construction employment sits near record highs, Washington is telling the opposite story. The state lost more construction jobs than anywhere else in the country between June 2024 and June 2025 — 11,300 jobs, a 5.0% decline — putting it ahead of California, New York, New Jersey, and Colorado for both raw job losses and percentage decline, according to the Associated General Contractors of America.
The scale of the gap
The divergence from the rest of the country is stark. Nationally, construction employment is up 9% relative to pre-pandemic levels. Washington, by contrast, still has 5% fewer construction jobs than it did before the COVID-19 shutdowns — a roughly 14-point gap between Washington’s trajectory and the national recovery. AGC chief economist Ken Simonson, presenting to the Inland Northwest Chapter in Spokane, put it directly: Washington has been hit harder than almost any other state in terms of declining construction employment.
The losses aren’t confined to one region of the state. Spokane-area construction jobs are down 7% since early 2020. The Seattle-Bellevue-Kent metro area lost about 1,700 construction jobs between April 2025 and April 2026 alone — a 2.4% drop that took the metro from 70,400 to 68,700 jobs and dropped it to 347th out of the 360 metro areas AGC tracks nationally.
What’s driving it
Simonson pointed to a combination of federal policy uncertainty as the primary driver — tariffs, immigration enforcement, and unsettled trade negotiations creating enough doubt that project owners are simply waiting rather than moving forward. “Policy is the major explanation for why things have slowed down,” he told the Spokane audience, adding that project owners are holding off until they know what the actual funding and legal landscape will look like.
Immigration enforcement carries particular weight in Washington’s numbers. Roughly 27% of the state’s construction workers are foreign-born, with far higher concentrations in specific trades — about 61% of drywall workers and 54% of roofers, by Simonson’s figures. A quarter of Washington firms reported their subcontractors had lost workers due to immigration enforcement, compared with 20% nationally.
On-the-ground signs of the slowdown
Garco Construction’s Hollis Barnett, speaking alongside Simonson at the same Spokane event, offered a labor-market indicator that resonates with contractors directly: union halls in Seattle that were virtually empty of skilled workers in 2022 now have workers on the bench waiting for assignments. Barnett also noted that the volume of projects reaching architects and engineers — typically a 12-month leading indicator of construction activity — has recently dropped off. Large Spokane-area projects like high schools and sewer upgrades have largely disappeared from the pipeline, and state transportation funding cuts have thinned out smaller public works projects as well.
Not every segment is shrinking
The statewide numbers mask a genuine bifurcation. Data center construction spending grew 28% year-over-year nationally even as office construction fell 5%, and Simonson expects that split between a handful of high-growth categories — data centers and the power infrastructure that supports them — and a broadly soft market elsewhere to persist. For Washington contractors, that means the overall employment picture undersells just how uneven demand is likely to feel depending on what segment of the market a firm serves.
What this means for contractors
Simonson’s assessment wasn’t alarmist but wasn’t reassuring either: not a recession, but getting close to one. For contractors and subcontractors in Washington, the practical signals worth watching are the ones Barnett flagged — architect and engineer intake volume as a leading indicator, and labor availability as a lagging one. Both currently point toward a market that’s cooling rather than one about to turn around quickly.
Source URL: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2025/sep/25/construction-is-slowing-in-washington-state-econom/
Source URL: https://www.constructionowners.com/news/construction-slowdown-hits-washington-hard-experts-warn
Source URL: https://seattlered.com/economy/seattle-construction-jobs-data-center-boom-bypasses-region/4119103
Source URL: https://www.tricitiesbusinessnews.com/articles/wa-sees-nations-biggest-drop-in-construction-jobs-over-year
